The Quantum Connection Read Free

ISEF as we called it, plus I got an honorable mention overall. I lost to a particle accelerator, an optical computer, some bioluminescence thing, and a wrong solution to Fermat's Last Theorem.
    As a special award I received a full tuition scholarship for both the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Dayton. Of course, as a California state citizen I could have gone to school in California for free, but my parents were way overprotective and I was afraid if I stayed in-state that they would continuously be checking in on me. What college kid wants that? So I didn't want to stay home, and I sure didn't want to live in a hick town in Alabama, so I chose Dayton; at least they have cool air shows there.
    My freshman year I got a cooperative education job working for a local company that made wireless data routers and switching hubs. I learned a lot about hardware, encryption, and code writing to drive hardware back then. Then the Framework opened up and not long after that The Realm was invented. Right off the bat I found a small Node and uploaded some tidbits that earned me a little extra cash to help pay for my apartment, food, and beer, and when I didn't earn enough from my job, The Realm, and my scholarship, I just took out a student loan. Oh, did I forget to explain that the harder to find a Node is, the more bandwidth you are allowed to upload with? You can use a Node as often as you like once you know how to find and access it, but it costs about fifteen bucks per second to upload data. I think this was RealmSoft's way of encouraging code writers to write efficient code and to spend hours in there looking for bigger Nodes. It's a great racket. A monthly subscription to The Realm costs about fifty bucks for forty hours, or seventy-five for unlimited access.
    What about viruses? There is rumored to be a World where all the viruses get stored and mutated, but it makes no sense to me why they would keep them. My guess is they use some sort of anti-virus Agent to take care of the problem.
    So, anyway, I had tried to Sequence a few times since The Rain, but knowing I would never see anyone I cared about took the real life out of me, and knowing that I would never get the chance to play ZZ again just took the wind from my virtual sails. On the other hand, I did need money to live on, since I dropped out of school, or I should say "took a break," lest the student loan collectors come calling, and the money I make at the video game rental and repair store that I work at now just doesn't pay the bills. My thinking was that if I spent all my time trying to reverse engineer ZZ's Hole, I could input it into The Realm through the secret Node I found on Planet Xios and win a few Sequences with it. Then I could sell it for big bucks to the other Sequencers. My EnergyBeingSM09 was bringing me about twenty-three thousand dollars a year (after taxes) on royalties, so I figured ZZ's Hole would make much more than that. Then, I could quit that damn video store.

    I was having no luck at all with it. Two years passed, and I still was getting nowhere. I replayed the recording of the video Sequence over and over and over to no avail. I tried testing in my own Test Realm the mini black hole codes I developed but test pilot Sequencer StM987 had failed and StM988 was about to give it a try, if I could figure out why StM987 didn't work that is. That JackieZZ, whoever she was, must've been a coding genius. Either that or she had some insight from her father at RealmSoft Europe. Make a short story long; I was having no luck and it was time to go to work.
    "Lazarus, buddy," I stroked his chin. "I gotta go pay the bills," I told him. He had grown into quite the companion. As a bonus, I didn't have to vacuum anymore--since Lazarus was a vacuum himself. If it could be swallowed, he would eat it. I tossed him a smelly doggy bacon treat and made my way out the door.
    The weather was a bit crummy, even for summer in Dayton. The sky was hazy